Reading an INCI label takes a minute. Reading it well takes a couple of products, a notes app, and one short explainer. This is the explainer.
Every cosmetic sold legally has an ingredient list — the long, hyphenated paragraph on the back of the box. It's printed in INCI: International Nomenclature of Cosmetic Ingredients. INCI uses Latin and chemistry names so that “shea butter” reads the same in Lagos as it does in Lyon.
Here's the thing nobody tells you when you start reading them: ingredients are listed in order of how much is in the product. The first ingredient is almost the entire formula. The last few might be a single drop in the whole batch.
The skeleton of a gloss
Strip a gloss down and what you're really looking at is three groups: the oils that carry shine, the wax or polymer that gives it cushion, and everything else — pigments, scent, preservatives, vitamins. The everything-else makes up maybe two percent of the bottle.
- Oils for shine. Castor, jojoba, caprylic/capric triglyceride. Look for these in the first three lines.
- Cushion. Hydrogenated polyisobutene or a wax blend. Without it, gloss runs off in five minutes.
- Pigment. Mica + iron oxides for sheer; lakes for opaque. Both can be naturally derived.
- Vitamin E (Tocopherol). Tiny amount, big shelf-life impact. We always include it.
What to skip
Synthetic fragrance is the single most common reason lips dry out by lunchtime. It shows up on a label as “fragrance” or “parfum” with no further detail — a single line that can legally hide thirty different chemicals. We don't use it. We scent our glosses with absolutes — actual extracts of vanilla, rose, or coconut — listed by name.
Mineral oil (sometimes Paraffinum Liquidum) is the other one. It's cheap, it's almost everywhere in drugstore products, and it forms a film that pulls moisture out instead of locking it in. Once you start checking, you'll see it everywhere.
Read three labels this week
Pull out three lip products from your bag right now. Read the INCI on each. Look at where the oils sit, what's pretending to be fragrance, whether the wax is named or anonymous. Three labels and you'll be quietly fluent for the rest of your life.
— D